The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  Despite his difficulties—and, in part, because of them—kindly, uncomplaining Bud became popular as Hothead, who had been there first, had never even tried to be. While the sluggers and fancy dans were paid to endorse razor blades and hair oil, Bud’s beautifully formed signature soon came to adorn the pages of medical magazines, where he was pictured in his gray road uniform with the scarlet piping and insignia, sitting in a wheelchair, or balancing himself on a crutch. Where it was feasible, he would always test a product before giving it his endorsement—more than most of his colleagues bothered to do for items far less compromising to a ballplayer’s prestige than oxygen tents and artificial limbs. And when the Mundys had a free day on the road, he never failed to go off to visit the local veterans hospital, where he would promise one of the amputees to get a base hit for him the next time they threw him anything good. He could not dedicate home runs to them, because big as he was he really could not be expected to hit home runs with only one arm, but every six or seven times at bat, he managed to smack a single, and then from the loud speaker there would be the announcement that Bud’s hit had been “for” so-and-so in such-and-such a hospital, and the fans would smile and clap.

  Around the league he began to build a real following among the handicapped of all ages; sometimes as many as forty or fifty of them would be out there in the stands along the right-field line when the Mundys and Bud came to town. The public address system had only to announce Bud’s number for them to begin banging on the railings with their canes and crutches. “Parusha’s Clinic” Smitty dubbed the right-field stands, and in Kakoola and Tri-City they even set up ramps out there to make things easier for the handicapped who turned out to see Bud perform. In their excitement some of his supporters occasionally went too far and would try, for instance, to touch him with the tip of a crutch as he came near the stands to field a foul, endangering his three remaining limbs, not to mention his eyesight. Once a woman in a wheelchair attempted to lean forward to pluck Bud’s cap off for a souvenir and tumbled out of the stands onto his back. But mostly they were content to just sit there and take heart from the courage and ingenuity that Bud displayed; in Kakoola, in fact, one fan was so inspired by Bud’s example that after ten years in a wheelchair, he found himself up on his feet cheering wildly as Buddy made a diving shoestring catch in the bottom of the ninth. It was in a column about this very fellow that Smitty coined the name “Parusha’s Clinic.” “I’m walking!” the man suddenly cried out, even as Bud was extracting the ball from his mouth to fire it to first to double off the Reaper runner and end the game.

  CRIPPLE CURED AS RUPPERTS ROMP

  the Kakoola evening paper reported to its readers that night—but then could not resist the sardonic subhead—

  TWO MIRACLES IN ONE DAY

  “Batting eighth for the Mundys, and playing center field, No. 6, ROLAND AGNI. AGNI.”

  Roland Agni (TL, BL, 6′2″, 190 lbs.), in ’43 a kid of eighteen tapering like the V for Victory from his broad shoulders and well-muscled arms down to ankles as elegantly turned as Betty Grable’s—swift on his feet as Nickname Damur, strong as a Johnny Baal, as mad for baseball as Mike Rama, and in his own baby-blue eyes destined to be the most spectacular rookie since Joltin’ Joe. One difference: the Yankee Clipper, aside from being four years older than Agni when he entered the majors, had also played a few seasons down in the minors; what was so amazing about Roland, Roland thought, was that he was leaping right from high school to the big time.

  Only there was a catch. Upon his graduation the previous June, Roland had turned down forty athletic scholarships in four sports from colleges all around the nation, and offers from twenty-three major league clubs in order to be signed up by his father with the Ruppert Mundys, the only team in the three leagues that had not even bothered to scout him. It was precisely their indifference that had convinced Mr. Agni that the Mundys were the major league team for his son, if major league team there had to be. Not that Mr. Agni, like some fathers, had any objection to baseball as a career; the problem was Roland’s pride, which, in a word, was overweening. The boy had been hearing applause in his ears ever since he had hurled a perfect sandlot game at age six, with the result that over the years he had become, in his father’s opinion, contemptuous of everything and everyone around him, above all of his family and the values of humility and self-sacrifice that they had tried, in vain, to instill in him. When his father dared to criticize him for his superior attitudes, Roland would invariably storm away from the dinner table, screaming in his high-pitched adolescent voice that he couldn’t help it, he was superior. “But,” asked his mother, using psychology, “do you want the girls to go around whispering that Roland Agni is stuck on himself?” “They can whisper whatever they want—they’d be stuck on themselves too, if they was me!” “But nobody likes a self-centered person, darling, who thinks only of himself.” “Oh don’t they? What about the forty colleges begging me to enroll there? What about the twenty-three major league teams pleading with me to play ball for them?” “Oh but they don’t want you for your character, Roland, or for your mind—they want you only for your body.” “Well, they should, because that’s what’s so great about me! That’s what makes me so phenomenal!” “Roland!” “But it’s true! I got the greatest physique of any boy my age in America! Maybe in the whole world!” “Go to your room, Roland! You are just as conceited as all the girls say! What are we going to do with you to make you realize that you are not God’s gift to the world?” “But I am—to the baseball world that’s just exactly what I am! That’s just what the scout said from the St. Louis Cardinals! Them very words!” “Well, shame on him, flattering you that way just so they could sign you up! As if you aren’t conceited enough! Oh,” cried Mrs. Agni, turning to her husband, “what is going to happen to him out in the real world? How will he ever survive the hardships and cruelty of life with such an attitude? Roland, tell me, whatever made you think you were such a hero at seventeen years of age?” “MY BATTING AVERAGE!” screamed the star, his voice echoing off the dozens of tropies in his room.

  Roland’s father listened politely to the twenty-three fast-talking major league scouts as each tried to outbid the other for his son’s services, and then telephoned the Mundy front office in Port Ruppert to announce that the father of the phenomenal Roland Agni was on the line. “Come again?” said the voice at the other end—“the phenomenal who?” No response could have been more heartening to the boy wonder’s dad. He gave the Mundy front office a brief account of Roland’s high school career: in four years of varsity play he had batted .732 and regularly hurled shutouts when he wasn’t in the outfield robbing the other team of extra-base hits. However, Mr. Agni rushed to say, if hired to play for the Ruppert Mundys, his son was to receive no more than the lowest paid member of the team, was to bat eighth in the line-up in his first year, and to rise no more than one notch in the batting order in each succeeding year. It would be more than enough for a boy as self-centered as Roland to leap from high school directly to the majors without making him rich, or clean-up hitter, in the bargain. These, said Mr. Agni, were his only conditions.

  “Look,” laughed the Mundys’ man in Port Ruppert, “what about if we go you one better and don’t pay him at all.”

  Mr. Agni leaped at the suggestion. “In other words, I would just continue to give him his allowance—?”

  “Right. And of course his room, board, and supplies,”

  “In other words, he’d be playing for a professional team but still have his amateur status.”

  “Correct. Of course, we’d need a deposit from you right off, so’s we can keep the eighth slot in the batting order open for him. And room and board we’d have to have in advance. You can understand that.”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “All right, you’re on. Now what’s that name again? Angry?”

  “Agni.”

  “First name?”

  “Roland.”

  “Okey-dokey. Spring training begin
s March 1, Asbury Park, New Jersey—on account of the war. Be cheaper for you anyway than Florida. We’ll hold the eighth spot for him until noon that day.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Angry, and thanks for calling the Mundys,” said the fellow, with a chuckle, and hung up, believing that he had just indulged a practical joker, or perhaps a sportswriter having some fun at the expense of the Mundy front office. Maybe even a fella name a’ Smitty.

  To find himself in the P. League with the Ruppert Mundys, and batting eighth in their line-up—and not even getting paid for it—had something like the humbling effect upon their boy that the Agnis had hoped for. Still, crushed and bewildered as he was by this bizarre turn of events, Roland Agni led the league in batting that year with .362, in hits with 188, in home runs with 39, and in doubles with 44. Of course with the pitcher batting behind him, he hardly scored, unless he hit the ball out of the park, or stole second, third, and then home; after getting on with a hit he was generally cut down at second on a d.p. or left stranded as the pitcher went out on strikes. And given the eight who batted before him he had no chance of doing much of anything in the r.b.i. department.

  In the middle of the season he was called for his Army physical and found unfit for service. First the Mundys, now 4F!

  It took a team of physicians a whole morning to study his marvelous V-shaped physique, whispering all the while among themselves—in admiration, thought the innocent center-fielder—before arriving at their decision. “Okay, Roland,” they asked, slumping wearily to the floor of the examination room after the three-hour ordeal, “what is it? Trick knee? Bad ticker? Night sweats? Nosebleeds? Sciatica?” “What do you mean?” “What’s wrong with you, Roland, that you’re too ashamed to say?” “Wrong with me? Nothin’! Just look,” he cried, standing to show himself off in the nude, “I’m perfect.” “Listen, Roland,” said the doctors, “there’s a war on, in case you haven’t heard. A world war. What happens to be at stake isn’t eighth place in the Patriot League but the future of civilization itself. We’re doctors, Roland, and we have a responsibility. We don’t want somebody going into a battle that may turn the tide of history, suddenly coming down with a sick headache and just lying down on the job in the trench. We don’t want the lives of an entire platoon endangered just because somebody like you has to stop to scratch his pruritus ani.” “But I don’t get sick headaches, or the other thing either.” “How do you know you don’t get ‘the other thing,’” they asked suspiciously, “if you don’t even know what it is?” “Because I don’t get anything—I have never even had a cavity, or a pimple. Smell my breath—it’s like fresh-cut hay!” But when he blew his sweet odor into their nostrils, it only further infuriated the doctors. “Look here, Agni—we want to know what the hell is wrong with you, and we want to know now. Constipation? Sinusitis? Double vision? Get the shakes, do you! Hot flushes? Or is it the chills, Roland? How about epilepsy, does that ring a bell?” they asked, slamming him up against the white tile wall to have another go at him with their stethoscopes. “No! No! I tell you, I never been sick in my life! Sometimes I even think I am impregnable! And that ain’t a boast—it’s a fact!” “Oh it is, is it? Then how come according to our records here you are the only unpaid professional athlete in the business? How come your old man is paying them to keep you on the team, rather than the other way around? How come an impregnable boy like you isn’t up with the Tycoons, Roland?” “That’s what I want to know!” cried Agni, and collapsed onto the examination stool, where he sat weeping into his hands. They let him sob until it appeared he had no more resistance left in him. Then they stole upon him where he sat unclothed and gorgeous, and softly stroking his golden curls, whispered into his ear, “Wet the bed? Sleep with a night light? How come a big strong handsome boy like you, leading the league in base hits and doubles, is still batting eighth for Ruppert, Roland? Don’t you like girls?”

  “Daddy,” Roland shouted into the phone when he was dressed again and back out in the world, “I am unfit for the service now too! I am 4F—ONLY THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ME!”

  “Well, there is that pride again, Rollie.”

  “BUT THE DOCTORS COULDN’T FIND ANYTHING, NOT EVEN THE THREE OF THEM TOGETHER!”

  “Well, doctors aren’t perfect, anymore than the rest of us. That’s the very point I am trying to make to you.”

  “But I should be 1A, not 4F! And not a Ruppert Mundy, either! Oh, Daddy, what am I doing on that team, where everybody is some kind of crackpot, thinking all the time about his name, or running into the walls, or having to have me sit on his chest to pull the darn baseball out of his mouth!”

  “In other words, what you are telling me, Roland, is that you are too good for them.”

  “It ain’t sayin’ you are too good if you just happen to have all your arms and can stay awake for nine innings!”

  “In other words then, you’re just ‘better’ than everybody else.”

  “On this team, who wouldn’t be!”

  “And it doesn’t occur to you that perhaps your teammates have had hardships in their lives about which you know nothing. Do you ever think that perhaps why you’re ‘better’ is because you were fortunate enough to have all the opportunities in life that they were denied?”

  “Sure I think about it! I thank my lucky stars about it! And that’s why I don’t belong with them, even if I was batting first and gettin’ a million dollars!”

  “Oh, son, what are we going to do with you, and this unquenchable thirst for fame and glory?”

  “Trade me! Trade me away from these freaks and these oddballs! Daddy, they ain’t even got a home park that’s their own—what kind of major league ball club is that?”

  “You mean for the great Roland Agni to be playing with?”

  “For anybody to be playin’ with—but me especially! Daddy, I am leading the league in batting in my rookie year! There’s been nobody like me since Joe DiMaggio, and he was twenty-two!”

  “And yet you’re 4F. Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all?”

  “No! No! Nothin’ means nothin’ anymore!”

  * * *

  “Batting in ninth position and pitching for the Ruppert Mundys…”

  The Mundy council of elders: starters Tuminikar, Buchis, Volos, and Demeter; relievers Pollux, Mertzeger, and the tiny Mexican right-hander, Chico Mecoatl—every last one of them flabby in the middle, arthritic in the shoulder, bald on the top. “The hairless wonders,” said Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, who had discovered the fine art of self-effacement following the tragedy that destroyed his confidence and his career, “and a good thing too. Ain’t a one of us could raise his arm to comb his hairs if he had any. Why, if I go three innings on a windy day, I got to use my other hand the next morning to wipe myself. Don’t print that, Smitty, but it’s the truth.” Yes, has-beens, might-have-beens, should-have-beens, would-have-beens, never-weres and never-will-bes, Tuminikar and his venerable cohorts managed nonetheless to somehow get the ball the sixty feet and six inches to the plate, which was all the rule book required of them. The ball, to be sure, occasionally arrived on a bounce, or moved so slowly and with so little English on it that the patrons back of home plate would pretend to be reading General Oakhart’s signature off the horsehide all the while the pitch was in transit. “What time you say she’s due in?” they’d ask, holding up their pocket watches, and on and on, comically, in that vein. There was even one of them, Chico Mecoatl, who on occasion tossed the ball in underhand. “How about if he fungoes ’em, Chico, then you won’t have to throw at all!” the sadistic hecklers called, heedless of the pain that caused Chico to resort sometimes to a style of pitching that had not been the custom now in baseball since the days of the buffalo and the Indian.

  The fans who needled the wretched Mexican were not so plentiful actually as their vociferousness might make it appear. Most people seemed to find it eerie, rather than amusing or irritating, to watch him work in relief. Invar
iably it was dusk when Chico, the last bald man in the bullpen, would trudge across the darkening field to pitch for the Mundys, already brutally beaten with an inning or two of punishment still to come. By this hour, the hometown fans, filled to the gills on all the slugging they’d seen, would have begun to leave their seats, tugging their collars up against the cool breeze and smiling when they peered for a final time out at the scoreboard to what looked now like the score of a football game. Two, three touchdowns for the home team; a field goal for the visitors, if that … So, they would converge upon the exits, a swarm of big two-fisted creatures as drowsy with contentment as the babe whose face has dropped in bloated bliss from the sugary nipple. Ah, victory. Ah, triumph. How it does mellow the bearded sex! What are the consolations of philosophy or the affirmations of religion beside an afternoon’s rich meal of doubles, triples, and home runs?… But then came Chico out to the mound, and made that little yelp of his as he tossed his single warm-up pitch in the general direction of Hothead’s mitt, that little bleat of pain that passed from between his lips whenever he had to raise his arm above his waist to throw the ball. The fans, clustered now in the dark apertures that opened on to the ramps leading down to the city streets, would swing around upon hearing Chico’s bleat, one head craning above the other, to try to catch a glimpse of the pitcher with the sorest arm in the game. For there was no one who had a motion quite like Chico’s: in order to release the ball with a minimal amount of suffering, he did not so much throw it as push it, with a wiggling sort of straight-arm motion. It looked as though he might be trying to pass his hand through a hoop of flames without getting it burned—and it sounded as though he wasn’t quite able to make it. “Eeeep!” he would cry, and there would be the ball, floating softly through the dusk at its own sweet pace, and then the solid retort of the bat, and all the base runners scampering for home.